Here are key tips for non-teaching, sometimes called non-contact lessons or PPA lessons. It is astonishing how quickly an hour passes, and how little we sometimes achieve by working hard. Here are some techniques to make the most of those precious 3,600 seconds of non-contact time.
Remember that, if you are following the TM4T method, you should never just have a 'PPA' lesson; you should certainly never have a 'free' lesson. You should have a timetable showing, for example 'KS3 Lesson Scripting', 'GCSE Assessment', 'Schemes of Work: Summer Term', or 'Year 8 Reports'. Your timetable should show a location for this work, and you should be confident that you have the resources and information you need ready to hand. If your timetable shows 'Tens' or 'Ticks & Twos', you will know exactly what you are going to do - you will be working from a list of tasks which you prepared yourself.
1. Be disciplined
An entry in your Weekly Plan is a commitment - keep it. If it says 'Mark Year 9 Assessment', do it. If something more interesting comes up, or something that your head-of-department is getting agitated about, then make sure it is factored into your plans... but DON'T let it interfere with Year 9 Assessment. Never cancel anything: you can postpone it, rearrange it, timebox it, but make sure that if it appears in your plans, it gets done. This inexorably builds your self-belief and sense of control.
Of course, if something really isn't worth doing, then don't do it, but this should really give you pause for thought. Why on earth, in the calmer purposeful atmosphere before term starts, would you write future self a note unless it was important?
2. Be prepared to acknowledge that working might not be the best option
Teaching is, in the vernacular, a 'full on' job. There are few limits and few real breaks during the teaching day. Clearly, the efficient teacher uses non-teaching time well, and "plans are meant to be followed", but non-stop work - especially work which may involve emotional confrontation - can be extremely stressful and tiring. In preparing your Weekly Plan, be prepared to plan yourself some social time or some relaxation time. Just doing nothing is rarely an effective way of relaxing or unwinding, but there are a range of options to help you to relax. Some options can be found here.
3. Be prepared to tackle work in bite-size chunks
If you are doing your Tens, this will happen automatically. If not, use the chunking techniques (read here) to tackle tasks in standardised, efficient time-periods. Time-box ruthlessly, deferring incomplete tasks. Remember, that there should be a short break between activities. Experiment with how you use this break: calm time, callisthenics, anything that refreshes your mind.
4. Avoid interruptions and distractions
Choose where you work and concentrate on the tasks in hand. No peeping at emails, or Facebook, no quick text messages. Be prepared to actively discourage those who disrupt your work. Equally, you need to be aware of the social norms and protocols in your school. Read more here.
5. Stay in the present - enjoy your achievement
Mindfulness techniques can help stop your mind from distracting you from what you are doing and diverting you into the past or future. (see here for information). You should seek to achieve what is variously described as 'Flow', 'Being in the Zone', 'Focused' or 'Grounded': a state of being so fully and pleasantly engaged in an activity that time seems to fly or stand still.
Concentrate more on how much you have achieved, the list of completed tasks, the pile of marked books, the folders of planned lessons.
6. Make things different - routine is not repetition
Your hourly cycle should vary from lesson to lesson when you are not teaching. You should mix up Tens, lesson-scripting, assessment, report-writing. You may find, half way into term, that you just want to change things round. That's fine.
7. Set a standard - start on a high note
Plan your non-teaching day so it does not start with the least pleasurable task (for example e-mails). Similarly, plan your non-contact lessons so you do not always plough into the most daunting slog straight away. Be prepared to have a nice chunk first before tackling the heavy stuff.
Note that if procrastination is a personal issue, then this advice does not apply to you!
7. Don't over schedule and don’t over-commit
Include contingency time in your schedule to allow you to prepare your day's lessons without interruption. If you aren't getting enough time to plan your lessons, adjust your schedule and look for ways to save time in other areas. Allocate a little X-Time to consider why you are using X-Time.
Similarly, you need to remember yourself as well as your students and your bosses. Make sure that your daily cycle allows some you-time (see Point 2 above).
8. Avoid binge and purge tidying
Do not allow clutter to disrupt your workplace but do not waste significant amounts of valuable time in 'tidying'. Use your in-crate as a regular - no, constant - dumping point for anything that is out of place or unprocessed. Then, use your schedule to deal with it in an efficient way - for example, your Weekly Plan may show 'lost property' or 'tidy office' as a task once a fortnight.
Some teachers have a pattern of behaviour which seems to mimic the binge and purge cycles associated with bulimia and anorexia - this can appear in different aspects of non-contact work and always need to be avoided. Some teachers gorge themselves setting student assessments for weeks at a time - but marking none of them - then do all their marking over one guilty sleepless weekend. Some teachers allow paper and sundry items to breed on their desks till it becomes an intolerable clutter. There follows a frenetic burst of filing and dumping. And the cycle begins again....
The key value of using time-management to reduce stress lies in regularity and routine. You should go to bed knowing that your inbox is empty, your office is tidy, you are up-to-date with your work, and tomorrow is planned.
9. Avoid double scheduling and multitasking
If you are marking, mark. If you are holding a meeting with your mentor, then focus on your mentor. Phoning parents? Then phone parents. Don't mix tasks up things up into one merry jumble - don't suggest that your mentor pops in during your marking lesson; or take parents' phone calls in the middle of a meeting. Single task: single focus.
Note: some books on time-management recommend 'single-handling'. This is an approach which is complementary to 'single-task: single-focus' which is what we recommend in the TM4T method. Single-handling implies that if you start an activity, you try and finish it there and then. This is great in theory, but not always possible in teaching due to the structured timetable and frequent interruptions
10. Learn to say no
Many teachers seem to misunderstand what this epithet - learn to say no - actually means. It actually means 'stop saying yes so often'. The principle of opportunity cost means that saying 'Yes' to one thing is saying 'No' to something else. All teachers need to learn the art of saying no. Remember that the most important things in a teacher's life are the things that you put on your timetable at the start of term: planning lessons, teaching children, assessing learning.
11. Don't say yes straight away.
As we've just seen, every 'yes' represents a thousand 'nos' - things that you could have done instead. However, that doesn't mean you can't agree to anything - it just means that you should think about the alternatives first, and make a decision when you are ready. You should develop techniques which support this approach. Ask for an e-mail instead of a casual chat. Routinely ask the questions which help decision making: “when does it have to be done by?', 'how much time is it likely to involve?', 'is this just a one-off thing?'.
12. Treat yourself as a disruption.
When you've mastered saying 'no' to others, try saying 'no' to yourself. This means that you should avoid overloading yourself with projects and unnecessary self-improvement commitments. You should use a 'maybe' list to help with this - a list of possible projects whose benefits just might overshadow the opportunity costs. When assessing these, you should ask exactly the same questions as you would to someone else: when-by, how-much-work, is-it-a-one-off. In practice, for a busy teacher, a 'maybe' list is really a 'vacation' list.
If an activity seems to be worth doing, but you really don't have the time to do it, to start it, or even to plan it, then you should add it to your Rainy Day Projects list. This should be a specific page in your A4 Notebook, usually the second last page.
13. Don't accumulate paper
File it or dump it? If it is physical, the rule is 'if in doubt, chuck it out'. This is not true of digital material - unless there is a real need to delete material, simply archive it - renaming the folder as 'Old' is usually adequate.
14. Keep your filing simple
Your filing system should be kept as simple as possible. TM4T I recommends that your general filing should be done in a single box-file per term, stored in a secure place at school. Box files are easy to store, as they can be stood upright on a bookshelf or stacked on top of one another. At the end of the school year, you should schedule a task to clear out the boxes for Autumn and Spring terms, and keep only the most important documents.
When it comes to electronic filing, the key messages for most teachers are these: 'keep it simple' and 'file regularly'.
You should use a memory stick as your primary place to store your documents. You should regularly - weekly - back up your memory stick at home, ideally onto an external hard drive. You should also regularly - weekly - back up your memory stick at school, onto 'my documents'. Your memory stick should have a separate folder for Resources. This should be backed up at home, not at work.
Specific filing advice here.
15. Elves and other helpers
For teachers there is an exception to the 'one in-box' rule. It can save time to have an 'elves corner' or an 'elve's crate' in your classroom, which contains work that your students can do (either as a sanction or for goodwill). This might include: returning lost property, alpha-sorting exercise books, etc...
This simple advice is well known to most teachers, but seems to escape others. Read more in this short anecdote here.
16. Treat time as money
At the start of the year, when you draw up your Full Timetable (click here), you effectively create a time budget, in which each activity (sleep, hobbies, marking) has a value. For example, you might decide that you will spend 50 hours a week sleeping. As the year progresses, you may be tempted to borrow from one budget to fund the other, for example 'borrowing' from sleep to do some marking. Don't do it. Live within budget by time-boxing activities. Time-boxing = time budgeting. Failure to keep to a time budget has the same consequences as failing to keep to a financial budget: everything that we borrow must be repaid with interest.
Bad habits creep in during teacher training - an hour's marking takes two hours, so we develop a however-long-it-takes mentality. Some of us regard it as a strength - it isn't.
17. Understand and apply the one minute rule rigorously
Some people view the 'one minute' rule as unnecessarily restrictive; 'Why' they ask 'Can't we follow a two minute rule, or a five minute rule? We would get a lot more done.'
This point is best explained by a metaphor. Your daily Ticks-and-Twos sessions are sprints. They need to be done quickly to work. Your mindset should be one of rapid processing of different items, with a limited number of outcomes, relying largely on the mental equivalent of muscle memory. You cannot reasonably sustain this mindset on tasks which require more than a minute's work. Anything longer means, in effect, that you are stopping what you are doing, starting something new, doing it, stopping the something new, and restarting your to-do list. This incurs re-tuning costs that just don't stack up.
In TM4T, we make a clear distinction between two similar jobs: ''Processing a Ticklist' and 'Processing Tens'. The main difference is one of pace. A To-Do list is a sprint, a Task list is a middle distance race. We never engage in a long-distance slog.
18. Gain Double-Triple Payback
Remember that we are always seeking the double payback that is offered by good time-management. You should have:
1. Less unimportant 'stuff' to think about and worry about, and...
2. More time to think about the other important stuff
Another way to think of it is this treble payback
1. We want to save time - by doing things quicker;
2. We want to improve the quality of our working lives by making sure that the time we save is time that we were previously spending on mundane, unproductive tasks
3. We want to spend the time we save wisely, to benefit both our students and ourselves.